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Katharine K. Wilkinson, "Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home" (Amber Lotus Publishing, 2026)
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- [00:00]
Narrator
My dad taught me a lot, including how easy it is to forget to cancel things. So I downloaded Experian, my bff. Big Financial Friend Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills, saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your Big Financial friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed $631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and OnePlus cancellations paid. Membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details. Experian K Pop Demon Hunters Breakfast meal and Hunt Trick's meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?
- [00:39]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [00:44]
McDonald's Representative
It is an honor to share.
- [00:46]
Patricia Hauser
No, it's our honor.
- [00:48]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
It is our larger honor. No, really, stop.
- [00:52]
Narrator
You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side
- [00:58]
McDonald's Representative
and participate in McDonald's while supplies last. Hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey, and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with. When we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing. If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [02:16]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
Welcome to the new books network. Many of us are feeling the increasingly mapless nature of our world, right? That with climate change, with democracy, with technology, there's so much change that is happening so quickly. And when it comes to climate, certainly our physical maps sometimes are coming up short. Right? That shoreline has slipped beneath a rising sea. That glacier is no longer where it once was. That forest has burned down. Right. Like quite literally. The fact that maps are not quite working anymore is true, but. But I think we feel it emotionally, culturally, socially that the ways we have traditionally navigated our paths, they're not quite working the way that, that we need them to. And so really, at the end of the day, this book to me is about how do we grow our capacities for navigating this shifting, liminal time and still finding ways to contribute.
- [03:34]
Patricia Hauser
That is the voice of Dr. Catherine Wilkinson, who has written a new book titled Climate Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home, a kind of training manual of sorts, designed especially for those wondering, what can I do with to help solve the climate crisis? I'm Patricia Hauser, one of the hosts for New Books in Environmental Studies, a channel in the New Books Network. And what follows is my discussion with Dr. Wilkinson, including why she puts people at the center of this book, informing and supporting people as they find their best way to help the planet. My guest today is Dr. Katherine Wilkinson, a climate leader named by Time magazine as one of 15 women who will save the world. Her publications include the New York Times bestseller Project Drawdown. The subtitle of that is the Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. And she co edited All We Can Save, which is an anthology of writings on climate change named among the 10 Best Science Books of 2020 by Smithsonian Magazine. Dr. Wilkinson is the co founder and executive director of the All We Can Save project and co host of the podcast A matter of degrees. Dr. Wilkinson, thank you for stopping by, Patricia.
- [04:52]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
It is so nice to be here with you and please call me Katherine.
- [04:56]
Patricia Hauser
Thank you and welcome, Katherine. I wonder if we could start by looking at the way this book is organized and how that organization serves a particular goal. For instance, this book is interesting on so many levels, but I just want to point out that when you sit down to read it, you realize, whoa, the author just broke the fourth wall and I have to actually participate here a few pages into the book, you even say, most books talk to you. These pages hope to walk with you. Can you explain the format of this book and why, with your expertise on all things climate, this became the emphasis at this time in your career?
- [05:35]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
I would love to. Yeah. So most books, and certainly most climate books, including those I have written and edited in years gone by, just talk to you. They tell you A lot of useful things. They may meet you in some of what you're feeling about the mess that we're in, but they tend to leave you at the end, perhaps still holding the question that you had at the beginning, which is, what can I do? Or what can I do next? Or now? And that question, what can I do? Circulates so much in this conversation, as you know. And my feeling over many years was that we were not doing a very good job of helping people answer that question well, and in a really, like, holistic way, not a punch list kind of way. That's just, you know, I don't know anything about you, but here's five things you should do. Patricia. And my other feeling about that question is that it's like it's something of a Russian doll. We ask, what can I do? But sitting within that question are often other bigger wonderings about what it means to be alive at this time, what it means to contribute where we belong. How are we going to cope? Right. These actually, these much bigger questions I think, get tucked into that one. What can I do? And a few years ago, at the All We Can Save Project, the nonprofit that I lead, we designed a program called Climate wayfinding that that helps people work through the looking inward, the looking outward, and the looking forward that I think real engagement derives from and grows from. And as we built that program and then we began to train educators, we now have a cohort of facilitators at 75 colleges and universities across the US and Canada will train a hundred more. At the Omega Institute this summer, I wrote some essays to help frame the program. And then I realized, oh, there's a book in this. There's a book here. So this is an unusual book in the sense that it grew out of this experiential learning and leadership development program and then found its way onto the page. So what I tried to do with those participatory elements in the book is bring in some of the experience you would have if you were on retreat, let's say, say, or in a classroom, and to make those accessible to anyone with a library card and Internet access. And at the same time, you know, if you're just looking for a book to read, it is that too right? It's sort of a choose your own adventure. If you just want to come for the sort of personal essays, the curated poetry, the stories of leadership in the book, that's all you want. Great. If you're excited about journaling prompts for free writing and creative mapping exercises and Guides for a small group journey to take the path of climate wayfinding together. Amazing. That is also here for you.
- [08:52]
Patricia Hauser
So this book can be used with a group of people who want to form, to be more climate engaged as a group and to have activities each time they meet. And it's really quite explicit. I'm kind of curious. Who was your original audience? Was it college students? Was it climate workers? What were you thinking in the beginning?
- [09:14]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
Who were, who were we imagining when we, when we designed this thing? Yes, well, and you know, I think this is a really important point, Patricia. This is not just things that I think might be helpful. These are things that over the last now four years we have really rigorously tested, sought feedback, honed them, gathered data both quantitative and qualitative. So you know, for, for folks out there who are hungry for rigor, there is that behind this very soulful book. The first pilots that we did were in 2022 and we ran some online and some in person and those cohorts were a total mixed bag. So everything from, I think we had a, a college junior who was probably our, our youngest participant, early career folks, people who had spent their careers in climate adjacent spaces and were newly concerned wanting to contribute. Those who'd been in the trenches of climate for decades and felt, you know, burned out and in need of renewal. It really ran the gamut. Even we had some retirees who were thinking about what's my third act and how can I use that for climate action? What was really exciting to see is that this process of looking inward with care, outward with curiosity and forward with courage, it really works. No matter whether you are newly climate curious or you are deep in and looking for what's the fresh path now and what those experiences taught me, whether we were gathering on Zoom once a week over some weeks, or whether we were in person at a retreat, we are so capable of giving each other what we need. And people are deeply hungry for community around this topic. And not just to know people and spitball about the facts and what the next action should be, but to come to a deeper, more human place and to bring a fuller kind of emotional life and kind of effervescent sense of possibility into the conversation that I think is so often lacking. And for most people, they're not actually even having climate conversations at all. We know there is an incredible silence around this topic. So we ran those general pilots and then we felt like as we were to take a first step towards training facilitators and sending the program out beyond our little tiny nonprofit team that there was such a clear use case in higher education. And so that is where we began with faculty and staff training them. They would go through the climate wayfinding experience and then we would give them kind of a toolkit and guidelines and support to bring it into their classroom, onto their campus in lots of different forms. And this year when we train facilitators, we'll be going beyond higher ed. We've got folks, for example, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium coming to train with us. So cultural institutions, community organizations, and ultimately what this book does is kind of leapfrog to some extent the need for facilitator training. It puts a lot of the pieces right into the hands of anyone who's willing to gather a group of friends or co workers or students and take this journey together.
- [12:43]
Patricia Hauser
So it's a community building. There's community building components in it. I can tell you there are self reckoning moments in it where you're asked
- [12:54]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
to go, oh, now I'm curious.
- [12:55]
Patricia Hauser
You're asked to go in and think about, consider something in your own life. For instance, you juxtapose these two feelings. Do you feel powerful? Do you feel joy? And you say, now these are two important components. Is it just a feel good exercise and here's how we deal with the stresses of climate change, or does this really get us closer to a safe planet?
- [13:22]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
What we have seen time and time again through this program is that taking this time to, to really get curious, to really explore and reflect deeply and imagine then becomes, it's almost like, you know, putting compost into your soil as you're just about to plant your garden in the spring. Right? It's like it is preparing for new growth, for deeper contribution, for fresh ideas. And we have seen that. We had a facilitator who shared with us that she had when she became a mom, that was kind of her entry point point to climate concern and climate engagement. And so she went to protests and she went to lobby days and she sort of did the things that people said. This is what climate action looks like. But she was really hungry for community and for some pathway in climate action that felt more authentic to her and to her unique talents and superpowers. She was in one of those first climate way, finding pilot cohorts. And what she realized was that her sources of power and joy were not actually about showing up to a protest or going to a lobby day. Not that she would never do that again, but that her like deep sense of life force in this work was about bringing People together. It was more in community organizing, it was in teaching and facilitating. And she's gone on to, to carve a new professional path in that space. So I think it's about gaining clarity around the pathways that really feel like, oh, that's mine to do. And I'm not just going to do it as a one off, but I'm going to do it with gusto and with the capacity for deep, sustained engagement over time. And what we see with students is that they have been filled to the brim with information. Right. They've been reading all those books like the ones I've done that just tell you a lot of things, but nobody has helped them. Think about what does this mean for my life and what could this mean for me in terms of vocation or career? Where do I fit into all of this? And so they are moving from like an overwhelm of information to much clearer orientation around how they can be part of this beautiful ecosystem of people who are trying to help mend the mess we're in. And at the end of the day we can have all the amazing technologies, policies, movement of capital that if we don't have people enlivening all of those things, developing all those things, it's all just a bit of a pipe dream. Right. Those hundred solutions and Drawdown only move if there are people there to move them.
- [16:21]
Patricia Hauser
That is one of the themes I do see in the book where you're saying, put people at the center, you know, yes, we're talking about all these calculations and as you say, you know, there are those books out there, including the one that you were the lead writer on, Project Drawdown, where guilty. I have to admit, when I was using it and teaching, I thought, oh yeah, this is really concrete. It not only tells you what will work, which one will be the most effective and how much more effective. And I thought, okay, problem solved. But you're saying there's more to it than that. So these workshops, it sounds like, help people in a sense last longer in the field of climate work because they feel more emotionally supported, they have a community and they made more enlightened career choices. But I think be interested in hearing you explain, why are the actions taken by groups like this more successful? A prepared group, a group that's gone through some kind of process like what you've carefully prescribed here.
- [17:23]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
I actually sort of take some history lessons from social movements that have come before us about how important this kind of like more intimate human infrastructure is. You know, you think about feminists in the seventies, gathering in living rooms for consciousness raising before any demands ever made it to legislatures. For example, you think about abolitionists connecting and organizing in Quaker meeting houses. You think about somewhere like the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee where Rosa Parks went to train, and nonviolent resistance before the Montgomery bus boycott. So there's this interplay, I think, between the more like invisible small spaces that tend to social change, communities and leadership, and then the big movements for change that we see out in the. And my sort of reading of all of that is that we don't get the big, splashy moments, right? The marches to Selma, Occupy Wall street, and Zuccotti park without this kind of quieter, reflective pieces of social change as well.
- [18:40]
Patricia Hauser
Wow, that's interesting to think of the networks and the support behind those people and how it made them more effective.
- [18:48]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
Because if we just, you know, we may sort of wake up to a challenge, but if we don't have anyone around us, if we don't really have a sense of our own place within the possibility for addressing that challenge, well, we'll just sort of be awake and twiddle our thumbs and worry and maybe recycle, right? But we won't actually be part of. Of the solution. And this is what we see very consistently in the social science data that we now have majorities of people who are worried about climate change and the ecological challenges we face. But it is a tiny percentage of those people who are active in any way. So I hold this visual of, like, we've got very full sidelines, and then the folks who are engaged, they're like, dragging and worn out. And so how do we enliven the whole thing, right? How do we welcome people off the sidelines and into the work? And how do we keep folks in it for the long haul? Because unfortunately, what we know we have ahead of us is a long haul of work to do.
- [19:55]
Patricia Hauser
That makes me think, can you cite some of the figures of what percentage of people want to help, they want to make a difference, and then what percentage of people are actually engaged?
- [20:04]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
Absolutely. Let me read a paragraph from the opening chapter. If you think of the climate crisis and feel bewildered, overwhelmed, useless, or inconsolable, you are not alone. Globally, 84% of young people are moderately to extremely worried about climate change. They express feeling sad, afraid, angry, powerless and betrayed by leaders. A majority of Americans are worried, too, and a quarter of the country expresses alarm about our heating planet. But a much smaller group, just 8% of us, has turned alarm into action through activism, donations, consumer choices, or even just Discussing the topic with friends and family. More Americans say they are willing but unsure how best to engage. Around the world, 89% of people want to see climate action from their governments, but often do not register that many, many others share the same desire. So 89% of people around the world want to see more climate action from government, but they also mostly believe that they are in the minority. And this is what happens, right, when we're sort of stuck in climate silence, that we think, well, it's just me, and, you know, my next door neighbor actually doesn't care about this. And so I think this community building and this expansion of a sense that we are in this together, we are a much bigger we than we realize. And I think that just has so much power and potential within it.
- [21:38]
Patricia Hauser
So a group that just gathers ad hoc. There's a local group here in a city in Connecticut where they just said, we all just feel as though we should be doing more. And they got together and brainstormed. They're trying to devise projects. And there's a sense in which these eight chapters would be a guide to them, to consolidate some of those feelings and anticipate some of the difficulties they might have with what they encounter and
- [22:05]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
build a sense of trust. Right. And reciprocity among them. Like, there's something really powerful about having that strong relational web from which action can grow. So a group like that would be perfect. This is the kind of book that you could gather up friends or neighbors, even those who are new to climate. It gives you a way and a structure, Right. It's not a heavy lift, but it gives you just enough structure to be able to have the kinds of conversations that I think a lot of us are craving. I think it'll be an amazing book in the workplace also for organizations that maybe they already have a climate commitment, or maybe they're interested in what that could be or look like. You think about a corporation. Part of sustainability is about strategy and about, you know, what are the nuts and bolts of those solutions. But it's also about culture and leadership and really embodying the values, right? So there's this human side, what, you know, the business world would call the soft side, and then there's the hard side, and we need both.
- [23:11]
Patricia Hauser
Let's get inside this then. And just. If I could take a little more of your time. And just some of the components of this workshop are interesting to me because here you have different pieces. It's almost like ingredients in a recipe where every chapter has kind of an inspiring profile of a person or persons who have entered the fray of the climate work. You call these sections lighting the way, but then you'll also have a poem and certain phrases have a lot of meaning. I'm just wondering, all these ingredients, the poetry, the inclusion of music, the strategically chosen profiles of these different climate workers, how did that get hammered? Yeah, like some of it looks like it was almost inspired by Eastern mysticism, some of it seems informed by mental health practices. So.
- [24:03]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
Well, I'll say there's a very intentional quilt of components in the book and they're also used in the experiential program. I think of some of it, Patricia, as almost the applied environmental humanities. Right. Like there's such power, I think, in art, in song, in poetry, to make us more porous and to welcome us in not just from our prefrontal cortex, but with more kind of open hearts and curious minds. And so that is a really important part of this. And in my own climate journey, kind of mindful and reflective practice has been really important. Really thoughtful emotional and mental health practice has been really important. So you see those reflected here. And in fact we had reviewers of the work who are mental health professionals because that was really important for us to, to make sure we were getting all of that right and that we didn't have blind spots. So it's a trauma informed also program and book. And I think we need all of these different modalities. And of course there's, there's rigorous scientific content in the book also. It's a kaleidoscope of sorts. And I think we actually end up seeing both the situation we're in and ourselves within it more clearly. When we keep turning the kaleidoscope and the stories of leaders, those lighting the way stories in many cases, these are people who have been teachers or important collaborators. For me as, as I have journeyed through climate over the last now almost 30 years. And they have, I think, such powerful perspectives on the different core ideas and themes of the book. And I love that they bring those in through their own stories, their own often hard won wisdom and how they move in this space. So you get a chorus in this book as well as essays that are really, from my perspective.
- [26:14]
Patricia Hauser
So then people can imagine what the experience of reading this book with others would be like. Can you cite one of their reactions where you thought, oh, we have to include that in the final project?
- [26:28]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
Well, I think the guided meditations that sort of appear periodically in the book are maybe an ingredient that you think, well, that's like a little, just Kind of unusual that you get a guided meditation in a book, especially one that says if you go on the website ClimateWayfinding Earth, you can listen to the audio version of this meditation. But those are really important because they invite people to go inward and to see what arises around the climate emotions that they're feeling and what guidance and motivation those emotions are offering around what their sources of power and joy are and to reflect on that and experience that somatically. Before we get into. What gifts of yours do you want to offer to climate? And one that I really love that's so generative in the program is around forward looking vision. So vision is one of those things that I think a lot of us feel like, oh, you've gotta be some extraordinary mystic or genius entrepreneur to have radical vision about what the future could hold. Right?
- [27:42]
Patricia Hauser
Right.
- [27:43]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
And this, the vision meditation is an invitation to see ourselves three years from now in deeply meaningful climate engagement. And there are always incredible surprises of what come up for people going through that meditation. Right. They catch a glimpse of something they haven't consciously thought about yet, but it bubbles up at this later stage of the climate wayfinding experience and then that spills into free writing and then getting more kind of tactical about action steps forward. I've just always found it so inspiring of kind of what we see more feelingly. Right. Like what we see with the more perceptive inner eye.
- [28:30]
Patricia Hauser
You mentioned the reader has the option to listen to the meditations in audio format by visiting a website. If you could just describe a little bit the way this website supports and provides materials to use while a reader is going through the book.
- [28:45]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
There's a lot that was easy to translate to the page and some things that just refused to be quite contained within within a book. So the website holds, for example, with the lighting the way stories. If you want to hear more from one of those leaders, we've got curated TED talks and podcasts so you can hear from them in different modalities than just in the way it is in the book. We've got the audio recordings of the guided meditations. We've got some really well curated resources for when you get to the stage around planning for action in our personal lives, our professional lives and in public life. What can those actions look like and where might I find footholds in my community or in my context? It's not an overwhelming amount of content, but it is really thoughtful multimedia or additional resources that can just add some additional dynamism and tools to this journey. One of the ones that we really love. And you kind of hinted at this, Patricia, is what we call the eight Dynamics of Climate Engagement, which is our guiding framework at the All We Can Save project. And it is the tool that we use when we're running climate wayfinding programs to say where's everyone beginning in this experience and where are we at the end of this experience? And we have worked with a fabulous web developer, Emmy Jackson, to take that tool and make it available to individual readers, to reading groups as well as our facilitators. So we're really excited that people will also be able to track for themselves where did I start in this journey and where do I find myself at the end and on top of all that.
- [30:40]
Patricia Hauser
So it's an opportunity to be self reflective even as you build your skill set in social ways and emotional to deal with what you're going to encounter as a climate worker, which has to be a daunting field to be in. And that's really interesting. I just, I wanted to point out that there are also just little features that some people may appreciate as well. There's even a link to personality type and career potential, these little quizzes you can take online to say where do I fit in in terms of my aptitude in all this, which may be relevant to second career people as well as college students and so forth.
- [31:19]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
Completely. I remember taking that Green New Careers quiz when it came out and I thought, oh thank heavens it thinks I'm a communicator. This is very good news, you know, so even if it's just sort of a affirms where you are like, it's a funny thing. I think that our talents, our superpowers, can sometimes have a way of escaping our ability to see and name them. Right.
- [31:44]
Patricia Hauser
But I, I just, you know, this book has all these little components. Is there anything else that you wanted to add in terms of what this book is supposed to accomplish in a world where the strains are getting much more evident?
- [31:56]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
You know, what I hope is that readers that reading groups, that people who come through the program, they feel at the end of it more equipped for the ongoing work of orientation and navigation and finding our next steps, even when, you know, we've got fog all around us, as the case may be.
- [32:20]
Patricia Hauser
This book will be released in May 2026.
- [32:24]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
May 5th. And we will be holding book events beginning in mid April in all sorts of spots across the US and we would love for people, if there's one near you, to come join us.
- [32:36]
Patricia Hauser
Thank you so much for your time.
- [32:38]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
Pleasure.
- [32:38]
Patricia Hauser
Dr. Catherine Wilcomson, thank you for sharing your time and for all you do as a climate leader. We look forward to the release of the book this spring. Climate Healing Ourselves and the Planet we call home.
- [32:52]
Dr. Katherine Wilkinson
Patricia. Dr. Hauser. Thank you for having me on, Sam.